[Blog] AI-Powered ITSM: How it's Redefining IT Operations through Proactive Intelligence
Each day, we witness AI's capability to enhance operations in ways that we could never have imagined just a few years ago—whether it's optimizing or automating. In modern fast-paced digital workplace, the growing volume and complexity of IT tasks are
[Blog] 4 Easy Ways To Boost Customer Satisfaction With IT ServiceDesk Software
Customer satisfaction is an often overlooked, but highly essential element of business growth. It’s simple: satisfied customers stick around longer and are more likely to cross-purchase and repurchase. They do display brand loyalty and typically increase
[Blog] Best practices to write knowledge articles
Knowledge articles play a crucial role and remain as the backbone of every successful organization that provides great customer service. When users have a question that can range from solutions to common issues, product or feature documentation, answers
[Blog] The best practices to optimize your ITAM
The primary objective of IT asset management best practices and processes is often to maximize the return on IT assets through better insights and management with a well-defined IT Asset Management (ITAM) process. However, even with the advantages it
[Blog] Top Incident Management KPIs that matter the most
Analyzing key performance indicators must be every ServiceDesk's best approach for successful results. Many of us have heard of this business adage, "You can't manage what you don't measure." This is particularly true in IT Service Management. KPIs are
[Blog] The Effectiveness of Multi-Channel Support for your Employees and Customers
Nowadays customer experience and employee experience are looking more and more similar. Evolving consumer experiences are shaping employees’ expectations for work experiences. Employees increasingly see themselves as customers of their employer, and the
[Blog] The 4 key elements of modernized ServiceDesk
Choosing the right ServiceDesk for your organization can be challenging. There are abundant software and umpteen of potential features to consider. We tend to get caught up in the excitement of assuming how all of those features might help to build a
[Blog] Boost First Call Resolution rate with these best practices
First Call Resolution, also known as first contact resolution and commonly known as FCR is one of the important IT support metrics. It refers to a team's ability to resolve a ticket — be it a question or an issue — in the first interaction with the user. It
[Blog] Benefits of managing ITAM and ITSM together
ITAM: The acronym of ITAM is "Information Technology Asset Management". In simple words, ITAM comprises of IT asset tracking and IT asset management. ITAM is a set of best practices that allows your IT team to manage, control, and protect all IT assets
[Blog] Understanding the differences between Help Desk and Service Desk
IT is full of jargons and overwhelmed with abbreviations. Many people have heard of Help Desk (or "IT Help Desk") and Service Desk (or "IT Service Desk") or something else altogether, but how do they differ and which one is the best for their business? So, most users often bombard us with one question: "What’s the difference between an IT Help Desk and Service Desk?". In this blog, let’s discuss the differences between a Help Desk and a Service Desk in more detail. Up until the release of the Information
Part 2: Recovery Time Objective - Plan of Action
In our previous post, Part 1: Recovery Time Objective - Plan of Action, we saw why RTO is important and various factors around it. And as promised, we will explore some of the common methods of recovery used by our users for our application. These methods have their own up and downs. In fact, there are methods that we specially recommend because they are designed by us. And we consider them complete-and-viable solution for recovery. Every other methods are simply workarounds for quicker or ease of
Part 1: Recovery Time Objective - Plan of Action
We recently saw why RTO, Recovery Time Objective is an important factor for running a profitable business. Let us now explore some of the best practices related to it with the ServiceDesk Plus’s perspective candidly. The Why, behind Recovery Time Objective: There are two important factors that we will have to consider in this case: Allowed Downtime/Affordable Downtime before the systems when can be bought online and Recovery Time - The time is taken to bring systems back online realistically. Strategically
[Blog] DevOps: A Philosophy for Rapid Progress
In the day and age of reaping results immediately, one set of practices that can be followed to achieve that effectively on a broad scale can DevOps. The lingo stands for nothing but Development Operations. The philosophy behind it could be thought as to fail fast and fail small. And this is a very cost effective way to run any form of operations. This is in stark contrast to the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen- continuous, paced improvement. Where Kaizen could be thought of as a life lesson, it might
[Blog] ITIL 4 - The 4th Industrial Revolution and how does it change the dimensions of ITSM
Axelos, the organization that manages the ITIL framework is in the process of releasing more modules to its latest version of the ITIL®, the acronym of Information Technology Infrastructure Library. The newest version, named ITIL® 4, was released in February 2019. Leading up to and since that time, people have called it lots of different nomenclatures: ITIL Version 4, ITIL v4, ITIL4, and so on. The correct designation for the newest version of ITIL is…."ITIL 4". Why drop the ‘v’ from the name? There
[Blog] Best practices for developing content for your Knowledge Base
Self-service is a dynamically developing trend related to the changing needs and expectations of users. Knowledgebase plays a pivotal role in self-service that empowers users to find information, request services, and resolve issues on their own. It’s about giving them the tools they need to solve their own problems in the future, and a self-service portal does this just beautifully. One of the key steps in creating a knowledge base is ensuring great content. Regardless of who is authoring the content
[Blog] A Practical Use Case for ESM in HR: Enhancing User On-Boarding
As described in our previous blog, ESM's primary aim is to help organizations improve efficiency, responsiveness to colleagues, workflow, and user satisfaction across departments. As businesses started witnessing and reaping the benefits of ESM, I'm going to talk on how ESM enhances and amplifies the user onboarding process in an organization and how a centralized tool can boost overall efficiencies of an HR department. There are two main reasons an HR team uses ServiceDesk Plus. The first is adding
[Blog] Benefits of moving ITSM beyond IT to Enterprise Service Management (ESM)
Enterprise service management (ESM) is an extension of IT Service Management (ITSM) tools, processes and/or best practices to non-IT departments, such as HR or facilities and other functional areas of the enterprise to better serve the needs of teams and individual employees. Consider ITSM and ESM as points on a spectrum that begins with an ITIL framework where ESM is the practice of applying ITSM with a strategic approach for designing, delivering, managing and improving the way IT is used within
[Blog] ITIL vs ITSM - What is the difference?
One of the most common questions we hear from people that are new to the world of IT Service Management (ITSM) is: "What is the difference between ITIL and ITSM?" This is even though most IT organizations use ITIL tools and some sort of IT Service Management (ITSM) strategies every single day, whether they actually realize it or not. People generally use the two important terms in the IT world "ITIL and ITSM" interchangeably without realizing the difference between them. This post is to help you
[Blog] ServiceDesk Plus Free! Software for Small Business Enterprises
ServiceDesk Plus is FREE! for SMB's and for all who need a complete helpdesk with knowledgebase management functionalities, extensive reporting, dashboards, and integration capabilities. We provide ServiceDesk Plus Standard Edition, with all these features and facilities, without a price tag. You can manage your business with ServiceDesk Plus Standard Edition, which comes with up to 5 technicians and an unlimited number of users for the self-service portal. It provides great visibility and central
[Blog] How ITIL distinguishes an Incident and a Problem
There is frequently a conflict between Incident Management and Problem Management. It’s a question we still get asked all the time, is how to differentiate an incident from a problem. To address this and offer clarification, this article will identify the differences between the two, how they are related, and why it matters. What is an Incident? According to ITIL 4, an incident is an unplanned interruption to a service, or reduction in the quality of service. The main goal of Incident management
[Blog] 11 IT ServiceDesk Tasks that should be automated to boost performance and quality
In this blog, you’ll learn 10 ServiceDesk tasks that IT techs. spend time doing day-to-day which can be simplified, automated, or even completely eradicated by bringing a fully-capable ITSM solution to play. 1. Routing tickets to the right people: How often do your techs. get assigned to tickets that should have been assigned to someone else? How much time do techs. spend every morning triaging and routing new issues? Not only it wastes your team time, but it also lengthens response and resolution
[Blog] Change Management : White Paper
Change Management with ServiceDesk Plus: A white paper! Like goodbye's, changes are hard! Every IT landscape must change over time. Old technologies need to be replaced, while existing solutions require upgrades to address more demanding regulations. It may be a big change, such as major organizational realignment or the revamping of critical operational processes. It can also be as simple as shifting email servers. Irrespective of the size of initiative or task, it is vital to recognize that change
[Blog] Why switching from Reactive Maintenance to Preventive Maintenance strategy is Remunerative
A famous one-liner quote explains everything about Preventive Maintenance Strategy, "Prevention is better than cure" Preventive Maintenance is a procedure devised to avert failures and extend the life of infrastructure, machines, software, facilities and various other entities. This is achieved by anticipating when there might be issues, rather than, wait for equipment to accrue issues. Thus reduces unscheduled downtime and major repairs
[Blog] Why analytics is crucial to ITSM
In a complex organization or infrastructure, there is no unified view to access and analyze the data. This lack of visibility results in hurdle of adequate governance, driving inefficiencies and increasing the cost of delivering services. Data Visualization platforms allow businesses to bridge the gap between information silos and to analyze all IT service related data in one single view. This integrated model empowers you to create detailed dashboards to provide insights into the performance, health,
[Blog] Benefits of Knowledge Management
Organizations that implement and maintain effective knowledge management see a substantial outcome as it helps: Reducing redundant works thus increases productivity and efficiency. Leveraging past experiences help to solve issues quicker. Providing better services to users. Users finding relevant information and resources themselves. Avoiding repeated mistakes. Accessing unique expertise widely. Knowledge management systems are proven effective in helping build more efficient work teams
[Blog] Critical System Failure using Request Life Cycle: A Short Overview
Critical Systems Failure is a phrase that even the most experienced IT professionals do not want to hear. Imagine your first day as an IT engineer with your team, and a file server storing all your critical data has crashed. How would you and your team react? Of course, there were Disaster Recovery arrangements in place and you have hopes of getting it online with the least overhead cost to the business. However, who has the authorization to execute the DR plans? Who has the permissions and skill
[Blog] Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
What is Search Engine Optimization and what it does? You may have heard about SEO, but you are not quite sure what it means and does. Or maybe you are not that sure how it helps you attain your goals. Whenever you type a question in the browser and hit the enter button, this query will go to search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on. The search engine returns a number of results to the related query term. If you have ever think of why some sites rank better
[Blog] Project Management guide for Startups
Let's extol all IT project managers, who had worked over a decade. In their earlier days of IT, they would have mastered classic tools like spreadsheets, emails, and presentation software, in order to manage and maintain projects, manually performing repetitive tasks will certainly be tedious. Technology has revolutionized our world and daily lives. Today we have sophisticated Project Management with endless automation. Project Management - The Scope of planning, organizing, and controlling resources
[Blog] Business Continuity Planning with ServiceDesk Plus
Business Continuity Plan refers to instructions or procedures that help you to operate the business without causing any impact to your customers during a disaster. The disaster can be natural or man-made. Unlike Disaster recovery, BCP ensures the continuity of the entire organization. BCP ensures that all the entities(asset, resources, people, location) in the business are available to provide the service to the end customers. A recent study says that less than 5% SMB have a BCP in place and this
[Blog] 8 safety recommendations for working from home "WFH"
The coronavirus pandemic has forced most employees to remain at home in most parts of the world and pushed into a novel territory "work from home" (WFH). This certainly allures the intruders to explore the possibilities to gain access to sensitive data which could be crucial to your organization and cybercrimes will increase at this time. Here are some tips to shun cyber attacks, 1. Educate employees with basic security knowledge. Say, how to beware of phishing emails,
[Blog] Responsibilities of Change Advisory Board (CAB) and Change Manager
Everyone knows change is never easy, but often quite necessary. The statement is never truer than in IT. Solid change management capability will help you boost your ITSM maturity, break out of the "firefighting mode," align IT activity with business objectives, and transform IT from a service provider to a business innovator. However, these benefits don't come easily. Change management is one of the most difficult ITIL processes to get right.
[Blog] Transforming User Experience
Visuals give us a better understanding of not just the content, but what is behind the content — easier, faster, and clearer than just a cluster of written words. Why User experience matters for an Enterprise Software? The success of any application depends on how usable is the product to the user and how easy it is for your user to interact with. Let us take a look on how ServiceDesk plus interface provides an updated look and usability improvements. Themes for Requester Self-Service Portal:
[Blog] Do you think Change management is important? Why or why not?
Change management is an imperative ITIL process as it helps organizations foresee the benefits even before implementation. This process is responsible for assessing overall impacts, planning, and approvals for the implementation of changes and ensuring minimal disruptions during the transition. Lately, organizations see change management plays an important role during the implementation of new technology. Change management has become a formal way of communicating with their users to tell them why
[Blog] The best ways to sell your Self service to your employees!!
How well do we feel when we brew our coffee from the Vending machine? We get exactly what we want. We know Self Service is beneficial to us because it saves time and helps to get quick service. Businesses with Self Service have always been delivering the service on time to the end-users and in turn, raise the bar to employee satisfaction. With that said, Convincing the Employees to use the Self-service is not as easy as building a Service Catalog. WHY? 1. Not all our users are tech-savvy. They
[Blog] Keys for improving the End-Users' Self-Service Experience
When a user has a problem, he doesn't want to spend hours on the phone trying to fix it. I recently had to work from home and faced an issue with network connectivity that halted my project work. I wanted to fix the issue ASAP as I was running too close to the deadline to submit the project. I didn’t want to reach out to the service provider which would test my patience. Immediately, I checked the service provider's online articles that helped me fix the issue in no time and I felt it was more convenient.
[Blog] Importance of SLA in an IT organization
Working in an IT Organization we often come across the term SLA "Service Level Agreement" A quick guide on SLA and its benefits. SLA definition : Service Level Agreement is usually a formal or informal agreement between the tool vendor and the end-user of the service. It provides a clear picture of the timeline for customer's expectations while contacting the support team. When you purchase a new product let say a TV, which has a huge market. It's always tough to pick one. Some brands are top
[Blog] Importance of Request tagging
Tags are words or a combination of words that can be used to tag similar requests with keywords and group them together. Most helpdesk software comes with a tagging feature but not all use this handy feature to it’s fullest potential. This feature can be helpful in numerous ways, below are the two factors why is this substantial to a helpdesk team, Guidance in Quickly Answering Questions – As a helpdesk technician, your salient goal is to easily and quickly clear those tickets as efficiently as you
[Blog] The Principle component of a HelpDesk Tool
Nowadays there are plenty of Helpdesk tools available in the market, they come with a wide range of features. Organizations deploying the Helpdesk tool should know the key components of a tool. An increase in users and retaining them are a crucial part of an organization's success story's. Yes, It's always important to set the right focus and understand what exactly your customer needs. Popular research on best ITSM tools states building a perfect Knowledge Base takes 70% of your support team's
[Blog] 8 significant stages of Asset LifeCycle
Every organization has assets. Your organization must be having assets too and managing them is always a challenging exercise. This is why the term life-cycle is very crucial in asset management. IT assets are generally managed using IT asset management (ITAM) software and a key process within asset management is the understanding of the asset life cycle. This gives the organization complete visibility and control of its IT assets. Here’s an interesting fact: In a recent analysis by Deloitte, it
[Blog] FCR's benefits in an organization
FCR - "First Call Resolution" is a vital metric of an IT organization, some refer it as the Pulse Rate. FCR directly or indirectly reflects your organization's growth. How does FCR work? When a user lands in a situation that's new to him/her or he/she is unsure about the situation. The next step he reaches out to his colleagues/friends to discuss the situation or he calls to the product support, hoping for a solution. When the support executive understands the situation in the first place and provides
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